Blogroll

Meta

While making puppets with my daughter, I thought why not make puppets for all the kids. Under this motivation I started thinking about the things my sons like. For one of them the choice is easy, dinosaurs. To add to the “cute” factor we’ll use his nomenclature for the name, and being very young and not yet mastered language dinosaur comes out Dino Door. For the look, we also have plenty of bubble fleece which could make a nice dinosaur skin.

Starting with green and using the pattern I’ve been using he started like the image above. However my son’s favorite color is red and we have plenty of red bubble fleece. In addition I wanted to try something different, and use the Glorified Sock Puppet Pattern, but give it the support of the foam head like the other simple series patterns. The finished inspiration should be more like this:

I am enjoying my sabbatical, and my wife suggested that I spend some time doing something I wanted to do for a while, build some puppets. We had a birthday coming up, and we had plenty of left over fleece from her blanket making from her crafting Mommyhood Notions, and I had time. So my daughter and I went to work starting on a puppet for her before diving into a super hero puppet.

Since this was for my Daughter we would go with some of her favorite colors, and build a fairy puppet. This is the design we started with:

After finding some great yarn and looking up some tutorials on yarn hair, we elected to go with pig tails and were going for this following design:

Well they say pregnancies are different (for the Mom), but that they are more alike than different. I think this one is very true to that as well.

With Lorelei, we fumbled around until one day her name clicked. The same seems to be true with our boys. We had one name, and two middles, now we’ve found the right combinations for us. I’m happy to say its not just baby A and baby B, or as Lorelei has been saying to Michelle’s belly “Prince Eric and King Triton.” and recently “Baby Braeden and King Triton”. From now on, she can say “Braeden (William) and Damon (Christopher)”.

After talking with our daughter we shared the names to the result “Perfect . . . which one is which?” She then proceeded to say “I’ll tell you” and point to Michelle’s belly followed by a kiss for each.

All things are going as well as expected, more on things later.

Posted in Family | Comments Off on Writers block until the names are chosen.

A picture frame we got for Lorelei inspired the original Family theme I started. For a time, much of her stuff was orange, purple, pink and some green. With more kids on the way, I’d thought I need to get the baby/family blog back up, and it was the perfect opportunity to complete the Lorelei design to use for the family blog.

I liked the rounded elements, and planned on some dynamic css. Unlike baby blogs, I like the rich colors found in her newest bedspread, a picture frame, and a photo album we got for her. I like the textures and patters they had too. Poka dots, corduroy stripes, and the butterfly and flowers. I played with elements like flowers, circles, and butterflies. I even tried playing with stripes and solids. I found inspiration in a card and another frame that captured the essence of what I wanted stylistically.

Now that we know that boys are on the way, and that the gender balance of the house will be shifting back to the middle, I’m seeking with more gender-neutral colors and designs. The Lorelei theme was heavy on pink and had the shapes felt very girl centric. I’ve been trying to play with colors that represent all the children we’ll have, and maintain colors Michelle, Lorelei, and I like or would be comfortable with. We like purple. My first attempt was to adjust the in-progress family theme. But it looks incomplete and doesn’t achieve my design objective.

This weekend I looked at the original Baby blog theme I created when we were pregnant with Lorelei. From a functionality standpoint it has much of what I want. I can post entries, it has a link to pictures that display after one has logged in (so the pictures are private, and can’t be grabbed by anyone who wants to snag some pictures). It had a caledar, and listed Categories, Archives, and Links to other sites., a link to photos and a wishlist. I then thought about the colors and the elements and decided I liked what I did with it. Although they are lighter less saturated colors like most baby items, it was gender neutral. It just needs some polish or updating. Based on the old design, I’ve come up with the following:

I finally am writing a family post. When Lorelei was just a baby in the womb I wrote a lot to keep others up to date on all the experiences of becoming a dad, or as I (and my father before me) like to be called a Papa. I had high hopes I’d track her first activities such as first craw, first rollover, her first steps, and all her words. As you may have seen that didn’t happen much.